CHAPTER XXX
When Maurice got back to the firelit library, he said, filling his pipe with rather elaborate attention, and trying to speak with good-natured carelessness, "I'm afraid Edith thought you didn't want her, Nelly." He was sorry the next moment that he had said even as much as that: Eleanor was breathing quickly, and her dark, sad eyes were hard with anger.
"I don't," she said
Maurice said, sharply, "You have never liked her!"
"Why should I like her? She talks to you incessantly. And now, she looks at you; here—before me! Looks at you."
"Eleanor, what on earth—"
"Oh, I saw her, when you were talking over there by the window; I watched her. She looked at you! I am not blind. I understand what it means when a girl looks at a man that way. And now she's planning to be in Mercer for three months? Well, that's simply to be near you. She'd like to live in the same house with you, I suppose! If it wasn't for me, she'd be in love with you—perhaps she is, anyhow? Yes, I think she is." There was a sick silence. "And, perhaps," she said, with a gasp, "you are in love with her?"
He was dumb. The suddenness of the attack completely routed him—its suddenness; but more than its suddenness was a leaping question in his own mind. When she said, "You are in love with her?" an appalled "Am I?" was on his lips. Instantly he knew, what he had not known, at any rate articulately, that he was in love with Edith. His thoughts broke in galloping confusion; his hand, holding the hot bowl of his pipe, trembled. He tried to speak, stammered, said, with a sort of gasp, "Don't—don't say a thing like that!" Then he got his breath, and ended, with a composure that kept his words slow and his voice cold, "It is terrible to say a thing like that to me."
She flung out her hands. "What more can I do for you than I have done? Oh, Maurice—Maurice, no woman could love you more than I do?... Could they?"
"I am grateful; I—" He tried to speak gently, but his voice had begun to shake with angry terror; it was abominable, this thing she had said! (But ... it was true.) "No; no woman could have done more for me than you have, Eleanor; I am grateful."